A Rutgers-Camden professor says it all depends on your emotional intelligence
A Rutgers–Camden marketing professor is taking a look at the emotional and cognitive factors that determine how consumers cope with those failures.
“A lot of research has been focused on the service provider’s side of the situation as far as developing strategies to recover from the failure,” says Yuliya Strizhakova, an assistant professor of marketing at the Rutgers School of Business–Camden. “Surprisingly, there is very little research on consumers, what they are actually feeling, and how they respond.”
Strizhakova’s research paper, “Coping with Service Failures: The Role of Emotional Intelligence, Self-Efficacy, and Intention to Complain,” will be published in a forthcoming issue of the European Journal of Marketing.
In her paper, the Rutgers–Camden scholar says customers employ three kinds of reactions to poor service: active coping, in which the customer focuses on seeking a solution; expressive coping, in which the customer seeks social support and focuses on expressing emotions; and denial, in which a person ignores the problem.
“The severity and consequences of the failure factor into a consumer’s response,” Strizhakova says. “But generally, a customer’s reaction to a service failure is tied to emotional intelligence and self-efficacy.”
Emotional intelligence is a person’s ability to control his or her emotions. Self-efficacy relates to a person’s belief that he or she can control the overall situation. Both determine how consumers process emotional information and deal with stressful situations.
Strizhakova says there are no significant effects of active coping on complaining because active coping is aimed at resolving the problem without the need to complain, whereas expressive coping increases customer complaining.
On the other hand, a higher level of emotional intelligence is positively associated with one’s expressive coping strategy, indicating the customer’s recognition of the need to deal with their emotions under given circumstances.
In her research, Strizhakova writes, “Customers who are better able to understand and manage their emotions as well as resolve a service failure avoid denial and focus instead on more adaptive strategies, such as active and expressive [coping].”
A Lansdale, Pa., resident, Strizhakova teaches marketing research and advertising at Rutgers–Camden. In addition to research on consumer forgiveness in service failures, she has published articles on product branding and the effects of globalization on consumer behavior.
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Media Contact: Ed Moorhouse
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E-mail: ejmoor@camden.rutgers.edu